Lynn Murphy's Blog – January 2012 Archive (4)

People ask me on occassion where my characters come from. Sometimes the answer is as simple as the fact that they show up somewhere inside my brain and grow until they have to come out. When I wrote When The Butterflies Flew Away, a book for younger children meant to be an introduction to the Holocaust, I wanted to tell the story of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis who taught art lessons to children in Terezin. I created a fairy tale type of story with Brandeis as The Art Lady. I don't know…

The most common advice given to writers is the cliche "Write about what you know." When I began writing The Time Of My Life what I knew about was at risk kids and running track. I was teaching at a middle school in a suburb of Memphis and our school's population came largely from an area that was neither city nor county, and where there was a lot of gang activity, poverty and kids at risk for failing. At the same time my two sons had been running track and had begun to excel at distance…

Spent the last two and a half days creating an author website (http:booksbylynnmurphy.yolasite.com in case you are interested). Not an easy task, but people assure me it is necessary. I talked with a friend who has a travel website and got some advice about getting traffic to you site. My biggest fear is that I am being really pushy about it in my facebook posts and that my friends will decide NOT to buy my book. (But typically, I find that many of my friends never purchase my books. Wonder…

I have never written a blog before, but it seems that most authors do, so I am jumping on the bandwagon! As a dislocated teacher I am trying once and for all to make the writing thing work as a career. Online marketing is unknown territory to me, but I understand that it has become essential to book marketing. (And I know almost nothing about regular marketing, given that I have five books and have made almost nothing in royalties.) I hope to learn some tricks of the trade from other…